[danielvf]

The report to the government about a more than 50% fraud rate was from six years ago. The Minnesota government was not serious about dealing with problem. Most businesses would not last that long with a 50% customer fraud rate.

Yes, there were some investigations and convictions, but nothing to on a scale that would deal with problem, nor any systematic change to a level paying huge amounts of money to scammers.

[Brybry]

He cites the 50% number from Jay Swanson, a CCAP Investigations Unit manager, and then dismisses criticism of the number by saying the criticism requires an unreasonable standard (only criminal convictions).

But if you read the cited source of how Swanson came up with that number he said it wasn't just for over-billing (claiming more kids than the places actually had).

Instead, by his estimation, the employees working are not actually working because 'children are unsupervised, running from room to room while adult “employees” spend hours in hallways chatting with other adults' and so all of the funds to those providers are fraudulent. [1]

I think it's pretty easy to criticize the logic for that 50% fraud rate number without requiring criminal convictions.

[1] https://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/sreview/ccap.pdf#page=16

[tptacek]

This is a great argument. I wish this is what we were discussing rather than Nick Shirley and the partisan politics of the issue.

[plorkyeran]

Oddly enough starting an article with a defense of Nick Shirley leads to the comments on an article being about that.

[tptacek]

I mean, I wouldn't have led off that way either, but I know what Patrick is talking about and I read the article. I genuinely believe the current administration is the worst in the history of the country, and I also believe that to oppose it effectively we need every government body we run to be completely on the ball, so it's really dispiriting to see people reflexively defend misconduct and incompetence. That shouldn't be a habit we share with the party we oppose.

(I can't speak for Patrick's politics, only for mine.)

[themacguffinman]

No government body is run completely on the ball, which is why it's such an effective bad-faith demand.

I don't even know where this belief comes from. I'm certainly not aware of any historical scenario where authoritarian regimes end when their opponents finally embody perfect behavior above reproach.

[tptacek]

It would be a bad-faith demand if I was asking people to assume every blue-state government was bad. But I'm not: I'm simply asking to recognize one that clearly is.

[cogman10]

5 years ago. And it looks like the state was actually taking pretty aggressive moves against the fraud including ongoing investigations and legislation to shut down the fraud. [1]

There was active prosecution ongoing literally right up until Shirly's video. That's taking the matter seriously.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_Minnesota_fraud_scandals

[joe_mamba]

>There was active prosecution ongoing literally right up until Shirly's video

Oh yeah, the prosecution was sooo active that all the daycares listed as operational and receiving funding, had no kids in them, had blacked out or boarded up windows, misspelled signs, and if you went in to ask for enrollment 3 angry men would come out shouting at you. How many legit daycares have you seen that look like that?

[cogman10]

Yes, because when I enroll a child in a daycare I start by wandering around the facilities with a camera man and then I demand to see the children. But sure is suspicious that this place has no kids in it when I visit it outside it's posted operation hours.

Nick did a day worth of shooting, didn't follow up, and didn't check basic things like hours of operation.

[tptacek]

Right, everybody, especially the author of this piece, agrees that what Shirley did was bad and stupid. And also unnecessary, because we had documentary evidence from the Minnesota government itself showing the scale of the fraud here.

[notahacker]

I doubt Patrick is the world's biggest Nick Shirley fan, but that's not really how it's conveyed in the article.

Shirley gets acknowledged to have "poor epistemic standards" (which is an almost euphemistic way of describing his approach) but Patrick goes on to say that "the journalism develops one bit of evidence...." and even appears to insinuate the NYT erred in reporting it in the context of the Minnesota government's response that the state's own compliance checks had found them open shortly afterwards but that some of them were under investigation.

There's an interesting point to be made that detailed, bipartisan evidence collected by suitably qualified officials that some daycenters were closed at times they were claimed to be open gets less attention than a YouTuber with an agenda rocking up at nurseries at what may or may not have been their opening times, but that's not how it's actually expressed. Rather it seems to be arguing for face value judgements of his video and against journalists that felt compelled to point out that whilst evidence of daycare fraud by Somalis in Minnesota definitely existed, Shirley's videos probably shouldn't be considered part of it.

[patio11]

The way I phrased that point was "The investigators allege repeatedly visiting daycare centers which did not, factually, have children physically present at the facility despite reimbursement paperwork identifying specific children being present at that specific time. The investigators demonstrated these lies on timestamped video, and perhaps in another life would have been YouTube stars."

[dtornabene]

He does not in fact call what Shirley did "bad and stupid". He calls him a journalist!

[tptacek]

To put it mildly I don't think there's a consensus among Minnesota DFL-types who paid attention to this that the state at any point took the matter seriously in proportion to its severity. There's a lot of evidence that they did the opposite thing. I try to avoid openly identifying my partisan commitments (see this whole thread for why) but: this shit is what we Democrats constantly dunk on the GOP for doing, and we're not acquitting ourselves well here.

It's annoying that we're talking about this in these terms, because the article is about public services fraud, and it's mostly technical, and it's an interesting subject. We shouldn't have to debate Tim Walz to engage with it.

[zahlman]

The volume of prosecution that had occurred or was slated to occur was laughable compared to the amount of fraud known or reasonably believed to have occurred. When it is done at scale, prosecution is inefficient and much less effective than reforming processes so as to preempt fraud, which is not something that happened, as evidenced by the continuing fraud after the initial round of prosecution.

FTA:

> So-called “pay-and-chase”, where we put the burden on the government to disallow payments for violations retrospectively, has been enormously expensive and ineffective. Civil liability bounces off of exists-only-to-defraud LLC. Criminal prosecutions, among the most expensive kinds of intervention the government is capable of doing short of kinetic war, result in only a ~20% reduction in fraudulent behavior. Rearchitecting the process to require prior authorization resulted in an “immediate and permanent” 68% reduction. (I commend to you this research on Medicare fraud regarding dialysis transport. And yes, the team did some interesting work to distinguish fraudulent from legitimate usage of the program. Non-emergency transport for dialysis specifically had exploded in reimbursements—see Figure 1— not because American kidneys suddenly got worse but because fraudsters adversarially targeted an identified weakness in Medicare.)

[dispersed]

First: assuming your goal is to stop the fraud, does making deliberately inflammatory YouTube videos get you closer to that goal? I think the government's response clearly shows that they're more interested in the optics of "blue state full of scammer immigrants" than any actual resolution.

Second: I think one of the points Patrick misses is that fraud did indisputably occur, but that doesn't mean we need to treat Shirley as a neutral observer who simply cares about fiscal responsibility. (If I'm wrong, I eagerly away his next video on red state fraud.)

[tptacek]

He's not treating Shirley as a neutral observer; he's lamenting Shirley's involvement, which has impeded efforts to clean this up.